The issue of homosexuality tests the commitment of African states to a culture of human rights, argues Shaun de Waal
HOMOSEXUALITY as a social issue – and gay and lesbian rights as a political issue – has recently arisen several times in the region, raising controversy in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and Swaziland. It seems to be coming out of the closet all over the subcontinent, testing the commitment of post-liberation African regimes to a culture of human rights.
South Africa is the first country in the world to give constitutional protection to gay and lesbian people, but the incidents in Zimbabwe in 1995 and 1996 indicate that not everyone feels obliged to make a similar commitment. As this paper reported, the plans of the organisation Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe to exhibit at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (1995 theme “Human Rights and Justice”; 1996 theme “Freedom of Expression”) brought on a tantrum from President Robert Mugabe, who viciously denounced homosexuality as subhuman.
The rhetoric of that denunciation, however, was not just a matter of equating people and certain animals. It also relied on the assumption – one the former Benny Alexander would recognise – that homosexuality is “unAfrican” or, as Namibia’s Finance Minister Helmut Angula put it, “Eurocentric”. This belief enables the employment of an Africanist and anti- colonial discourse that pushes many of the right buttons in post-independence Africa.
Such words echo Frantz Fanon’s anti- colonialist analysis (one which appealed to and inspired Steve Biko), showing how the terms of masculinity and liberation have been entwined in the discourse of African ideological struggle. Fanon conceived the psychological processes of colonial and racial oppression – the dissolution of the oppressed’s sense of self-worth, and so on – in psycho-sexual terms. The black man, he said (naturally he refers to a universalised male), had been “emasculated” by the “rape” of colonialism, and freedom would entail a recovery of a symbolic virility.
It has been easy, thus, for demagogues to represent homosexuality as something imported from the West along with colonialism, something alien imposed on Africa by violence, another colonial “rape”, and thus justifiably eradicable. (The same logic, bizarrely, is applied to Aids – it’s a white man’s plot, and so forth.) It is as ironic as it is significant that the Zimbabwean homophobes fell so easily into the rhetoric of corruption.
As ironic is the fact that much anti-gay feeling – and the apparent need to police sexuality at all – seems inherited from Christianity, which is a Western imposition on Africa if ever there was one. It must be noted, too, that the fight around homosexuality and gay/lesbian rights in the Western democracies keeps revolving around the same terms, descendants of the Christian idea of sin as moral corruption, of perversion as a deviation from the true path.
No one in Britain involved in trying to keep the age of consent for same-sex relationships at 21 invoked the idea of “unAfricanness”, but still the talk was of an illness in the social body, of perversity versus normality. And the tempers that explode in the United States over legal protection for gay and lesbian people are hardly cooler or more civilised than those of Africans grappling with the issue.
For Mugabe to discover that the man who had been president of his country while he was prime minister is accused of forcing his attentions on young male aides cannot have been pleasant. It is unfortunate that such incidents – and the attacks by Mugabe and those more recently by Namibian office- bearers – should be the catalyst for the examination of gay rights in Africa, but the issue clearly needs to be addressed, and now that the opening shots have been fired, we can get on with the war.
A recent pamphlet published by the Scandinavian research group, Nordiska Afrikainstituet, in its Current African Issues series vigorously explores this question, placing gay rights firmly within the ambit of human rights. The booklet – Human Rights and Homosexuality in Southern Africa, by Chris Dunton and Mai Palmberg – describes first-hand the two book fair dramas in Zimbabwe and gives an overview of the situation in the region, including an exeptionally useful summary of the status of the debate.
The view that homosexuality is unAfrican is not confined to Mugabe, as the authors note. Leaders such as Daniel Arap Moi and Julius Nyerere have expressed similar sentiments. The gist of this objection, as Dunton and Palmberg point out, would appear to be: “Homosexuality doesn’t exist in Africa – but don’t do it anyway.”
Yet more and more voices are being heard, breaking the taboo of silence around homosexuality in African culture: the firm stance on gay rights taken by the African National Congress and President Nelson Mandela in South Africa may well have encouraged people in neighbouring countries to demand their rights.
Anti-gay rhetoricians claim that there is no word for homosexuality in African languages, which is simply untrue (Shona: ngochani, Sesotho: maotaoana …), but it does point to an important issue in the way homosexuality is traditionally understood in African culture. The concept of a homosexual identity – as opposed to an unnamed sexuality that is open to a variety of acts – is a relatively recent one. The word “homosexual” is barely 130 years old, while acts such as sodomy have been criminalised since the Middle Ages. Dunton and Palmberg write that “same-sex intimacy is tolerated [in African society], as long as it remains unnamed, and as long as it does not exclude sexual acts with members of the opposite sex”.
It is the naming that is important, though, on the political level. It is the first step toward the insertion of gay rights into the larger agenda of human rights. Around the world, the battle for gay rights has been based on a politics of identity, the formation of a minority that can organise itself and demand its dues.
In Africa, the process of naming what hitherto could not speak its name has begun. And it is clear that the issue of gay and lesbian rights – the right to be protected against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation – is something of a litmus test for the emergence of a culture of human rights in Africa.